Executive Outcomes: Against All Odds

Today the role of private defense contractors, private military companies, private security and advisory companies and similar organizations have become well known through the employment of Blackwater in Iraq. Prior to the legitimacy that Blackwater brought to the business in Iraq there was a long period where such organizations, staffed mostly by white ex-military professionals, gained a great deal of bad press as `mercenaries' in Africa and elsewhere doing the dirty work that locals were either incapable of doing or that foreigners wanted done. Executive Outcomes (EO) and its story from 1989/1993 to 1999 represents a mid-way point between the over-professionalization of these types of companies and the more rambo-derring do of a previous era.